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You can contact the author (Teguh Hidayat) by email, teguh.idx@gmail.com. The author live in Jakarta, Indonesia.

See my pictures in Instagram, @teguhidx.

Have You Evaluated Yourself?

Li Ka-shing, a business magnate
from Hongkong who once became the richest person in Asia, had an accident in 1996 when his oldest son, Victor Li, was abducted by a
gangster
named Cheung Tze-keung, and the gangster demanded a ransom at HK$2 million. Instead of calling the police, Mr. Li granted
the kidnapper’s
wish by
giving the ransom demanded.

Mr. Li met Cheung in
his house, ‘I
only have cash of HK$1 million. If you wish,I can go to the bank and
draw
the rest.’

After short discussion
with his friends, Cheung decided to accept the money instead (it is equal to US$ 150
million). Before Cheung left, Mr. Li said, ‘You now have plentiful money to spend for the rest
of your life. While you still have a chance, you should go far away and never
come back, try
to find a fair job and be a good person.’

Mr. Li
continued to say, ‘Because if you do this again, no one can save
you.’

Cheung,
astonished, asked, ‘How could you be
so calm? Your son was abducted, and you lost HK$ 1 billion.’

‘Because it was my mistake’, Mr. Li
answered. ‘I am an honored person in Hong Kong, so I would likely to be a
target of the crimes, but I was not careful. This will be my lesson to guard myself and my family more carefully.’

Cheung, impressed, bid a
farewell with a good manner and left, and later Victor Li was released safely. But unfortunately
Cheung could not do what Mr. Li suggested. In the next few months, Cheung
kidnapped significant figures in Hong Kong and the mainland China for ransom.
Finally in 1998 he was arrested in Guangdong, China, and sentenced to death.

The
Significance of Evaluation

Okay,
what is the lesson we take from the story above? Well, pay attention to the
bold sentence of Mr. Li: When you have to lose your money in a great amount
because of other people’s doings, are you wise enough to blame yourself alias introspection? I think if another
person had been in Mr. Li’s position, he would have cursed the abductor, and
blamed the law enforcer of Hong Kong for letting Cheung and his allies free
(before he abducted Victor Li, Cheng was a recidivist of robbery and abduction
cases, who often to go in and out of prison).

However
Mr. Li did not do it. He did not blame the abductor, but he blamed himself
since he was not careful, and took a
lesson from the incident.

But it
was Li Ka-shing. What would have happened if it had happened to us? When we
take a loss on the stock market, who do we blame for? Do we blame the
wholesaler, JCI and FSA, or equity sales of the brokerage company? It is
often for me to hear an investor fights with his sales when JCI drops, because
the sales cannot explain ‘why does stock A fall?’. They may complain they are
fooled by ‘the wholesaler’ because they buy the stocks which skyrocket but then
they go down rapidly. When an investor buys a stock without analysis (it is a speculation) and he takes a loss, he
has a scapegoat to be blamed for. In short, everybody
is doing wrong except me!

The
problem is, when we blame ‘the market maker' because they fooled the retail
investor, would they stop stirring the stocks? Obviously not. Or if we blame JCI because it falls, then will JCI ‘realize its
mistake’ in the future then climb up?? It will not! You say a nonsense..

But when
we point ourselves as the one who has to introspect, then from that awareness
we can introspect ourselves. Like Li
Ka-shing, he would not ask all the gangsters in Hong Kong ‘Do not kidnap my
family anymore!’
(and how he would do that???). What he could do was to be more careful, he
might do it by hiring a bodyguard or anything like that. How about the HK$ 1
billion? Well, let it go, we will get it again. Just consider it as ‘the expense’
of the lesson to be more careful.

And I think, Li
Ka-shing’
ability to blame himself when he took a loss or lost the money, was the
reason for himself to always evaluate and
introspect.. which
made him to became a wiser
person from time to time, and eventually led him to become one of the
most wealthy people in Asia.

So, while
it is still at the end of the year, have you reviewed and evaluated your investment performances in 2016, so it would be your
collection of experiences for you in
the future?

If you
have not, well, with this article I suggest you review your stock trading
during 2016, and the points you may improve, when we are in 2017 and onwards
you will have the better investment results. You can write it in the comment
column.

(Note: if
you are confused on what to write, then let me give you an illustration. When I
entered the stock market for the first time, I had already known window dressing, it was mentioned the
mutual fund managers would intentionally raise certain stocks to make their
investment performances better at the end of the year, and JCI would climb as a
result. But after some years, I had learned that window dressing was only a
myth, because statistically, JCI tended to drop rather than rise at the end of
the year. Based on the experiences above, then I invest more carefully/hold
more cash on the final months in a certain year, and become aggressive at the
beginning of the next year or a moment
before the new year, alias Christmas and New year holidays).

Farewell
2016, thanks for all the lessons and memories! (And also the profit, lmao!)
Happy New Year!

Original article was written (in Indonesian
Language) in December 25, 2016. For
inquiries, please contact the author by email teguh.idx@gmail.com